In Teach for America’s Teaching as Leadership (TAL) Rubric, motivation is called “I want.” In order to achieve or create, one must first want to achieve or create. Games research points to motivation as something games are excellent at cultivating, therefore, the exploration of creativity, motivation, and games prior to building an early concept or project idea is essential.
First, for there are the obvious motivation breakdowns of intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivations. In my experience, the best creatives are primarily intrinsically motivated, as somehow the act of creating is motivating. Reflecting with my adviser, I told her that there is something extremely gratifying about feeling and watching a creation take shape, then holding it in your hands and reflecting upon it once it has been birthed. How does that motivation develop? What is needed? Why do have I had it over the course of my life and, say, my mother has developed it only since my graduation from high school (and its still a work in progress), and some folks never get there? There are a couple of theories of motivation I will discuss here that seem to provide some level of explanation for this.
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
Perhaps one of the oldest theories of motivations Maslow's Hierarchy of Human needs, (1943) is a pyramid shaped view of what is required to be motivated. At the first level are physiological needs (food, water, shelter), followed by safety, love, then self esteem and finally self actualization. Creativity and creative acts fall into the top of this pyramid. In particular, the issue of self esteem, broken into achievement, recognition, mastery, and respect seems vital to creating.
This comes from a great deal of self reflection on times when I was not particularly creative: ie, when I could not find a job after leaving Teach for America, my toughest weeks teaching my students while in Teach for America, while realizing my English major was not a good fit for me. These stresses were all from feelings of self doubt and a lack of achievement. This stymied my creativity. I didn’t draw, I didn’t write, and I watched too much television. I wanted to be creative, but I couldn’t find Csizsentmihalyi’s “flow” state, nor could I even find a decent idea.
Now, though, I must ask a chicken and egg question, given I invariably fall into “creative” personality types to begin with: was I unable to create because I was stressed? or was I stressed because I was unable to create? Maybe one fed the other.
Lindstrom seems to believe that creativity should be cultivated and must be, through a motivational creative culture (ie, I was stressed and therefore unable to create). He uses an example of students from Stockholms Bild och Formklasser (The Stockholm Visual Arts and Craft Classes), who outperformed students of the same age in creative performance standards.
He suggests this is:
“attributable to the culture of learning that Stockholms Bild och Formklasser offer. ‘Children are given the opportunity to get deeply involved in and complete their various projects’, and the art and craft teachers, whose classes are half the size of regular classes, ‘are in constant dialogue with the students about their work as it evolves’ (from teacher interviews).”There are aspects of environment and culture that motivate students toward a higher level of creative performance. In fact, we can say is that games are good at providing these elements of self esteem, achievement, mastery, recognition, and respect (Schell, 2008). Games are remarkable at providing feedback and providing “sandboxes” for people to explore possibilities, something that will be explored further in this piece (Gee, 2007).
This talk of self-esteem and achievement, leads to a theory that breaks similar elements down in a different manner: Self Determination Theory (SDT).
Self Determination Theory
SDT was frequently discussed in my Theories for Serious Games course back when I began my graduate school adventure. According to this theory, factors that influence motivation, are competence, autonomy and relatedness (Ryan et al, 2006). With dissection, it is easy to see how these factors lie at the potential intersection of games and creativity.
Competence
Gee wrote that “Motivation, for humans, lies in challenges that feel challenging, but doable, and in gaining continual feedback that lets them know what progress they are making” (2008). This concept of a task being pleasantly frustrating is directly related to feeling of competence, called by Gee “Regime of Competence” (2007). Competence, in SDT, is the need for challenge and personal feelings of efficacy (Ryan et al, 2006). I feel that I can do something, and need that something to challenge me. In my opinion, easy tasks result in automaticizing it--such as “grinding” in an RPG. There is no active reflection, creation, or iteration in that process. However, when one is provided with a boss, all of the sudden there is a need for strategy in the problem to be solved.
The same is true in being creative--doodling is fairly automatic and requires little thinking. However, to render the climax of a story in your head with pencil, the pen and ink requires more reflection and provides a challenge. For some folks, that is too big a challenge and leads to a lack of competence, for others it is the perfect challenge and very motivating.
Lindstrom describes the challenges thus: “Experiments that always succeed involve no risk; they teach us nothing that we did not know already.” However, in early stages of creative developing challenge seeking must be encouraged as the student does not yet have internal feelings of competence.
“If a student is to be adventurous and willing to take risks, the teacher must show appreciation and approval of her courage to take further something she did not already know or master, even if the outcome is not always the intended one” (2006).
This will, again, bring us back to the importance of the sandbox later.
Ultimately, within the realm of competence, you wind up with highly motivated “cycles of expertise (Gee, 2008). Within creative domains, more than the issue of creativity, there is an important notion of expert, artist, musician, or craftsman. An expert appears to have reached a high level of motivation, and is perceived by others as competent. It is what they do that is important to creative processes and how we come to create:
"Experts routinize their skills and then challenge themselves with new problems. These problems force them to open up their routinized skills to reflection, to learn new things, and then to integrate old and new.” (Gee, 2008)
This process is deeply tied to competence. To come back to games, Gee states “Games let learners experience expertise.” This allows them to experience competence. So games can create competence and competence, according to Ryan et al, is related to enjoyment (2006).
Since creativity primarily a way of thinking, achieving competence should be straight forward. Less than one would think. Creativity is tied to creative domains. You can be a creative thinker but without a creative action (unless you are very lucky and land a job as an ideator of sorts) isn’t noticed. That is because creative thinking and creative process ends with a creative product: drawing, painting, writing, experiment, architecture, robot, website, lesson plan (yes, teaching is a creative field), etc. These domains require skills beyond processing, complicating issues of motivation within creative fields.
In fact, I see often a conflict between skills in creative domain and creative cognitive processes. However, this issue really jumps out in research on gifted children. The issue is called, for children, “asynchronous development.” Now, this issue is actually more complex than what I am describing and refers to complex issues of emotional, social, intellectual and physical growth happening at different rates--something that stands out in particular with gifted children (Tolan, 2005). Why? Because often their creative or intellectual processes are more highly developed than their physical developmental level, leading to frustrations that present in a variety of behavioral challenges. It also has the benefits that qualify them as gifted in the first place. (Total disclosure, I am what some psychologists call the “gifted adult”-a child with giftedness that grew up.)
“Giftedness is asynchronous development in which
advanced cognitive abilities and heightened
intensity combine to create inner experiences and
awareness that are qualitatively different from the
norm. This asynchrony increases with higher
intellectual capacity. The uniqueness of the gifted
renders them particularly vulnerable and requires
modifications in parenting, teaching and counseling
in order for them to develop optimally.”
(The Columbus Group, 1991).
Case and point, for a long time as a child I could imagine whole worlds and scenes in my head, but when I went to draw them on paper my fine motor skills turned them into horrible drawings--my perception. (Actually, the truth is they were likely better than I thought they were because of a practice and mastery issue.) My fine motor skills had to catch up with my cognitive ability to visualize and create in my head.
Which returns me to the issue of skill verses cognitive processes: if one’s fine motor skills prevent a person from drawing the image they picture in their head, this hurts the person’s perception of competence, which can destroy motivation. For many people, this asynchronous skill level, I’m sure, likely prevents them from pursuing certain creative domains (and some people, all creative domains).
Why is skill such an issue? Well, outside of possible talent, there is absolutely an issue of mastery that I believe is more powerful. “Practice is the cause of achievement” (Levitin, 2006) or as my learning coach at Teach for America Philadelphia Institute said, “Practice makes permanent.” Some of this ties into a theory involving ten thousand hours of practice. Levitin discusses this theory in his book, This is Your Brain on Music.
"Ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world class expert.-- Ten thousand hours is equivalent to three hours a day, or twenty hours a week, of practice over 10 years." (2006)
Talent is involved on some level, but not without practice. Someone who is complacent with their talent is likely to be trumped in skill by someone who has the motivation to practice. Also, a person who is motivated and enjoys acquiring a particular skill is more likely to appear to develop the skill faster, as in reality they practice more frequently and achieve the ten thousand hours soon. Related to is how we learn and memory work: "Memory strength is a function of how much we care about the experience" (Levitin, 2006). Someone practicing over and over again with no care of success is less likely to achieve mastery than someone passionate about the same act. Motivation leads to attention, related to flow.
So, back to a comparison between my mother (love you, Mom) and I. I love drawing and have loved drawing since I could hold a pencil. My mother allowed me a fantastic environment to explore creation and play in our house. I drew frequently and would study various ... okay horses. I drew many, many horses (I suppose, a very complicated “object”). I received much praise for my drawing to negate my internal thoughts of “that’s not how it is supposed to look” (asynchronous development). It was easy to hit ten thousand hours.
I still draw today and do wild and crazy things like this:
Or this:
My mother, drew as a child, but stopped. She has more recently picked up on creating “art” again, through scrapbooking. In fact, my mom has always been very creative--or she would likely not have been able to set up such a great environment for me to create in! However, skill and thus competence was a detractor in her creating for herself. Now, my mom is just beginning to draw (with encouragement from motivational factors outside of competence).
Obviously, because of this issue of ten thousand hours, the perceived skill gap between myself and my mother is large. However, that does not mean she is not less creative, just less practiced, and feels less competent, so has taken less risks. This gives me a great series of questions to pursue:
- What do we do to encourage creatives like her- people obviously with creative thinking skills that have not applied these to a domain or are learning the skills later than typical development?
- How do we motivate them to continue so they achieve ten thousand hours of practice, mastery and thus competence, adding to their intrinsic motivation?
Relatedness
My mom, rather than competence, is helped along considerably by relatedness, another factor in SDT. This area of motivation relates to my creative breakdown of exhibition and reflection, both of which require a level of community involvement.
When my mother began scrapbooking, she and a friend cropped (a scrapbooking get-together) a lot together. This friend, a serious artisan of many trades and former teacher, coerced her into joining an local online community, Columbus Scrappers. These folks hold contests online, share techniques, and regularly get together to crop. With this encouragement, my mother got braver with technique and began using Youtube to find video models of new things to try. She was learning to play in her scrapbooking room and making cards.
The friend, when I was getting ready to head to MSU, convinced my mother and I to join Swap-bot an online mail art trading community. We both did, and took to making Artist Trading Cards (ATCs). My speciality was hand-drawn and my mother joined a lot of paper crafting swaps. Almost a year later, my mom is starting to hand draw, borrowing my art supplies, and getting truly “messy” with her work (I love messy art--it means you are having a good time).
What happened? Relatedness. Social influences provided the motivation to continue in a risky hobby (ATCs are risky--you have to hope the person you send them to like them). She had her daughter, through joining this art group she was able to have new and interesting conversations unavailable, bond from far away, and swap “together” despite distance. She had her friend, who she could drive to and visit for new techniques and support. She had her original community of Columbus Swappers, to crop with and make ATCs with in live events.
Now she also had the Swap-bot community, with deadlines, themes, groups, comments, raitings, and “hearts”.
Ratings are 1 (never received), 3 (did not meet swap requirements), and 5 (met swap requirements). As you can see, ratings have nothing to do with perceived “quality” of art (though if it falls apart you can get a 3). However, the number is kept by meeting your commitments to other swappers. This is a pretty good incentive to “art it up”.
Hearts are a reward. A swapper gets hearts if the person they send to really loves what you sent. You need 5s to be allowed in groups and good swaps, but hearts are bonus and a swappers way of saying “You did a great job and I love this!” That is a motivating, virtual pat on the back (with a hint of gamification). It also functions as a kind of exhibition of the piece--someone else sees your art and judges it.
On top of that, when swappers rate, they comment. Some comments are pretty vague “great job.” Others provide ideas for new techniques “you should try using alchohol inks on plastic next time, I bet you’d like it”, ask how you did something in your art “what medium did you use?”, or other comments that provide positive, constructive feedback, “I like the combination of textures”. These comments actively help a new artist in reflection on their work. This is important to creative development: “children respect considered assessments and criticism, because they indicate that the teacher cares for them and is paying attention to their work” (Lindstrom 2006), and the same appears true for adults.
Augmenting relatedness for my mother, was what Gee calls “affinity spaces”, exemplified by a “common endeavor”, “newbies and masters” sharing the space, sharing “intensive and extensive knowledge” and “individual and distributed knowledge” along with other types of knowledge, many forms of participation, many ways to achieve status, and many ways to be involved in leadership (Gee, 2008). Both Columbus Scrappers and Swap-bot could be called affinity spaces.
Autonomy
Autonomy is a sense of choice in any given task (Ryan et al, 2006). In that respect, many acts of creativity could be the very definition of autonomy, since they are often derived from divergent thinking and choice. That being said, there is a motivating environment for autonomy that I have brought up on several occasions: the sandbox (Gee, 2008).
Accoridng to Gee, “at risk” learners need time to "play around" in the learning space. "They need to always see failure as informative and part of the game, not a final judgment or device to forestall creativity, risk taking, and hypothesizing." (Gee, 2008) This time to make their own choices with limited consequence is crucial to any learner. Lindstrom puts the importance of this aspect of autonomy in line with creativity:
“In order to further creativity, students should be given enough time to investigate, test and revise, to reflect and speak to peers, and to make critical assessments of their own work.” (2006)To be creative, one must have a degree of autonomy. However, autonomy seems so embedded in creativity and the creative domains, it seems unnecessary to spend a large amount of time on the issue at the point.
Identity
Moving beyond SDT, there is one final notion of creativity and motivation I would like to discuss. This is the idea of identity. According to Gee, in games and often when practices life, or enters a new domain, one assumes a projective identities. For example, "I am an artist” or “I am a writer." This is an important step in development as a creative person or any other type of learner:
"If learners in the classrooms carry learning so far as to take on a projective identity, something magical happens. The learner comes to know that he or she has the capacity, at some level, to take on the virtual identity as a real world identity." (Gee, 2007)
The learners has the competence to say “I am a scientist”. I’ve seen this with children, but it is funny how modeling the hat of “I am an artist” results in certain students saying “I am an artist too.” Changing their rhetoric and perception of themselves, all of the sudden it doesn’t seem to matter that their art is not as developed as mine. They are a practicing artist and the skill will come.
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These issues I’ve addressed will all factor in to a persons perceived creativity within any given domain and their own intrinsic motivation. The sticky thing is that they are all interrelated. Targeting the most important of these for the audience I choose will be an important step in my project development.
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